Saskia Sassen — A Short Essay on Visibility, Globalism, Art, and Sprawl in Atlanta

Saskia Sassen. Photo courtesy the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen’s studies on urban space and globalization have a great deal to offer the arts community. At her recent lecture for ART PAPERS Live!, Sassen stated that the city is no longer a clearly defined self-contained nucleus, but has evolved into multiple interconnected systems of meaning. Each part symbolizes several fragmentary connections, both between cities and with the globalized world at large. For me, Sassen’s concept of the global city provided a way to discuss arts communities as cultural frontiers, and for reconsidering how we in Atlanta participate in a vast community structure of international cities. In particular, I was struck by her idea that urban density both increases visibility while also rendering certain things invisible.

The Global City by Saskia Sassen

Now this is a lot to think about and would take me far more than 700 words to even begin to discuss!* But for the sake of this article, let’s think about visibility in terms of Atlanta specifically. Atlanta is a city defined by multiple components, none of which are exclusive to Atlanta; from commerce to labor and population, all aspects of life are influenced by actions in other cities in hundreds of other locations. Since so many elements of cities today are mirrored around the world, there is less to distinguish one location from another. Globalization causes the need for counter projects to create distinctions that are no longer available by merit of geography alone.

So, on a more micro level, let’s think about the arts community in Atlanta. We have a level of dispersion between multiple gallery centers within the same city: Buckhead, the Westside, Castleberry, etc. Is it possible that the invisibility Sassen has mentioned on a global scale is present within this microcosm? Are galleries and art spaces “lost in the shuffle” because of a lack of distinction between them?

Luminus Flux at Le Flash 2008. Photo by FrenchKeldar.

A counter project, or simply a radical change from the mainstream mold, is needed to transform these spaces into visible entities. It is critical that more radical movements are made to create visibility for our arts. Events such as Le Flash and A New (Genre) Landscape remove the viewing experience from the confines of “the white box” and elevate the artists and institutions involved to a higher level of visibility. In a very different but parallel way, Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s ability to unify—encompassing nearly every gallery in the city for the entire month of October—also creates a new type of visibility for each participant, in that these spaces are no longer separate entities, but have become one vast whole.

Prospect.1 installation by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry at the New Orleans African American Museum. Photo by Joyce Youmans.

Another aspect of Sassen’s talk that struck me as particularly important for Atlanta is the idea that competition between cities is unnecessary. Since all cities are globally connected through various circuits and fragments, shouldn’t we try and connect more with other arts communities? Atlanta, New Orleans, Jacksonville, and Birmingham are so close geographically, and each has a strong and unique arts presence. (Consider Prospect.1, for example.) While there is some communication, what more could be done to create more visibility, both within and without each city?

Of course, I won’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but I think it’s a dialogue that should remain open.

*I should point out that Sassen’s discussion of visibility and invisibility was but a small portion of a much larger lecture. For further reading by Sassen, I would recommend beginning with The Global City.

ART PAPERS Live! will host Ute Meta Bauer for “Scripted Spaces: The Exhibition as an Architecture of Discourse” May 13 at 7PM at the Hill Auditorium of the High Museum of Art.

Tags: A New (Genre) Landscape, Art Papers Live!, Art Papers Magazine, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, globalism v. regionalism v. localism, globalization, Le Flash, location and the public sphere, Saskia Sassen, The Global City, the Southeast